A Datomic entity browser for prod [video]
3 points
2 hours ago
| 1 comment
| youtube.com
| HN
codemonkey-zeta
52 minutes ago
[-]
I'm a big fan of Dustin, I think the programming interface electric presents is very compelling, and the benefits are really impressive.

The killer feature, for me, of electric is that it makes the network _transparent_ to me, the programmer, and makes solving complex problems concise.

I see electric as a kind of emacs - an excellent operating system that lacks a decent front-end. Reactive programming is hard, and it really ought to be way more visual, and electric should give me those tools.

I find the frontend side of the electric somewhat obtuse, and it's easy to go off the rails, needing to understand the underlying reactive layer https://github.com/leonoel/missionary. Why should I target this bizarre DSL when there are millions of React, Angular, JQuery apps out there that work, and would be too onerous to adapt to this style of programming, and too annoying to carry a second framework in prod (even if you bundle an electric app in your existing one, the runtime can be very big by web standards). I would love to see a framework built on top of electric that interfaces with any existing frontend as easily as it does now for any backend (Datomic is just one target of many for the spreadsheet Dustin built). I may try to explore this idea myself.

But is the business of Hyperfiddle building instances of this new hypermedia, or the hypermedia system itself? I don't understand exactly what Dustin is selling me, at the end. Trying to sell this particular spreadsheet as a solution, or is it access to the runtime (electric 3)? How am I supposed to buy into a new programming model if I cannot use it?

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